Snow is overrated, the sequel

I read the weather complaints of my colleagues who were at SXSW in Austin last weekend with some amusement. While they were dealing with an untimely spring cold front that brought in some nasty-ass winds (take note: “nasty-ass winds” is an approved meteorological term) that hampered their enjoyment of free music and beer, here’s what I was dealing with:

(Photos by Robert Johnson)

This was the scene Sunday morning from the third floor of my motel in Plano. Yes it snowed in Dallas last weekend. Again. This winter, a city that hadn’t seen a white Christmas since the 1920s has also seen a white Valentine’s Day and a white first weekend of spring.

It’s probably my fault — I invited this sort of karma in my original “Snow is overrated” post in December. Despite having to drive through a horizontal snowstorm to get to my mom’s house on the northeast side of Dallas on Christmas Eve, I still wished for a bit of snow this winter for San Antonio, which hasn’t seen a major snowfall since 1985.

Obviously the Snow Gods got a garbled message.

The result was a contingency I had never anticipated — that my son and his new bride would leave their wedding reception Saturday night in a car with “Just Married” scrawled in the snow on their windshield. Or that my chief photographic issue would not be a short learning curve for the new external flash I had bought two days earlier for my digital SLR, but instead having said camera hit by a snowball.

Fortunately, it was a glancing blow.

After the events of the past three months, I’m also getting a healthy disrespect for weathermen. Remember the first weekend of December, when they said S.A. was sure to get snow; it was just a matter of how much? We got just a few stray flakes downtown, which was still enough to make Express-News staffers a bit giddy. Several frolicked on the second-floor smoking deck outside my window. Not a pretty sight.

Last weekend’s Dallas snow barely got a mention in the forecast, which called for rainy and cold weather, with just a hint of the “S” word.

So imagine my surprise when I walked out in the middle of the reception to see it snowing. Big time. Not just a light dusting, but soft, chunky, Wheaties-size flakes. And it kept coming. It snowed all night, and was still snowing a bit next morning. Some six inches piled up in suburban Dallas, which took the expected toll on traffic. We saw two bumpers laying on the interstate as we left town Sunday afternoon. The cars they had been attached to were nowhere in sight.

Since weird weather tends to follow me wherever I go (last summer’s Alaskan heat wave was my bad; we were up there for a cruise), maybe someday I’ll learn to stop wishing for weather-related things. Saturday’s spring snow did have one benefit — one wedding guest from Nebraska said he felt right at home.